Vol XL, Graphic

1. Graphic
2. Out of the Hat, a Red Car
3. Mary of the Tunnels
4. The Pilot
5. The Counterman
6. Portrait of a Dyslexic
7. Portrait of a Schizophrenic
8. Portrait of a Sociopath
9. Stalker
10. Mouths
11. Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Ear
12. Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Eye
13. Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Hand
14. Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Neck
15. Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Tongue
16. William Carlos Williams, in retrospect
17. Still life with a burglar on the fire-escape ladder
18. Red house in the middle of the road
19. Chromatic

Graphic

Dead girl taps on the door, eases it open.

Daylight is a line across the hardwood floor.
Daylight is a line fading yellow under the rug.

Death is not a door; it is a jar left uncapped for years.
Now, that jar has been filled with dust.
Nothing stirs anymore.

Dead girl stows her right hand inside the closet,
her left eye inside the bottom drawer,
her ears on top of the mantel,
her feet in the area under the easy chair
where no one will ever bother to look.

Out of the Hat, a Red Car

This prototype of blind dates
and to-order Russian brides
looms like a catastrophe.
A hat is brightly lit inside yet
it looks like any ordinary hat.
The magic tricks ensuing from it
are another thing. They change
according to perspective.
It is late. The wineglass tinkles
like the heat inside a sealed car
left exposed during midday.
She feigns surprise at his mention
of marriage. He pretends not to notice
the expression on her face, the slump
of her shoulders, the glint in her eyes.

Mary of the Tunnels

On her feet is the black river of piss, exhaust,
and civilization. The air bracelets her from
wrist to wrist, tackles her soundless flight.

Her toes sink into the sludge.
The sewer rats shriek. All their
shadows are symmetrical.

Now her mouth is shaped into a vowel,
a scream. The darkest door.
Soon she will open up, receive us.

The Pilot

The sky is a bed nailed to the ceiling; it turns
when I sleep. I do not think about it that much

these days. It may show up in my psychological
tests, the ones I have to take every six months.

Most of the time I imagine the plane growing
outward, throttling the last breath of a giant tin can,

thickening the fog as it arches from takeoff,
the path of air lengthening in its wake.

The Counterman

Mornings are pickled, impatient.
The bell never stops ringing.

The knives clink to be sharpened.
The glasses tinkle like frozen birds.

All mouths and no eyes,
the dinner plates scream:

Mayo on the bun, salt on the sun,pepper on the periphery.

Portrait of a Dyslexic

Her pain is a love poem,
her song, part-silence, part-scream.
She is as harmless as a schoolboy's
act of gnawing at a pencil stub.

Undisturbed by the natural pattern
of migrations, the death of prom queens,
she sometimes stifles her breath while
staring at words--condensing, out
of focus yet always there--
a momentary lapse, which follows
the direction of the avalanche.

Portrait of a Schizophrenic

What you are now is just a sight, a spark
of desire bereft of half a memory. You bloom
in secret, you lovely traitor, you. The sky is a gassed lid, you say, a hand that has been fractured in anger. Along the way, you pick up
discarded pieces of everything to find the ones
you've lost. You want to understand/not understand
everything/nothing. At home, you extend
that matted darkness to reach the back of your neck,
try to look behind you as you remain very, very still.

Portrait of a Sociopath

1
I do not know how to make
a bleached heart sing,
but I can count portable miracles
while I sit in the waiting room.
There's the toothless one,
the sagging, the bloated, the defaced.

2
Each grief is the price
of a five-second laughter,
I tell my grandson. He keeps on
playing near the stairs. In my dreams,
I see him tumble down; his toys remain
safe on top of the stairs.

3
My face--sometimes, I do not recognize it.
The mouth melts four times a year.
The eyes I can gouge out then pop back in.
What are these people in the waiting room
looking at? I am not here.

4
The streets end where I take them.
I leave the door ajar for my return.

Stalker

The sidewalks are vessels filled with buzzing noise
and leftover grime from daytime's little cruelties.

of darkness; every one is hungrier each time.
A hysterical rhetoric of love. A hand makes its choice,

covets the image at the farther side of the scope, worships
what the incendiary eye sees behind each eye.

Mouths

All burning houses have doors like
theirs. They are not easily forgotten.

Furrowed at the edges. Like water
hammered and split against the grain.

Mouths rely on the integrity of the
jawbone. Can spit, stutter, and betray.

No other orifice can take back a lie
like this--so pitifully defiant, so red.

Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Ear

It can be mistaken as a crook of shadow,
a cross-sectioned seashell softened to keep
its shape against the weight of jewelry
suspended upon its lobe. It protrudes like that,
the side stitched to the skin to keep it warm.

Director's Cut, Exterior Panel: The Eye

An instrument of suggestion, it is
errant as a trace of flesh-colored wax
under a sculptor's fingernail.

It is out of focus yet always there.
It misses the signs, misreads
instructions, fakes loneliness.

It is a cutout from a nursery rhyme book,
the one about the old woman
whose stare can turn anyone
into stone, into paper,
then back again.